TuxMachines has a quick look at Mandriva Linux 2006 Beta 1. This beta has been quietly released over the weekend; DistroWatch lists the mirrors where you can download. You can see the full package list here, and a screenshot gallery here.

We rarely take anything out of main unless it's no longer used or has been replaced by something else with equivalent or superior functionality. Not sure what your problem with the CUPS web interface is: http://localhost:631/ appears to work perfectly well on current Cooker, I didn't do anything special, just typed in that URL after reading your post.

2005 LE was, as all the release PR and other stuff said, meant to be a release for enthusiasts, not businesses. Hence the CrazyTux (tm...not really). Besides, it really, _really_ isn't all that much work to change it.

Between smb4k, smb:// on GNOME and KDE, and the Samba mount wizard in the MDV Control Center, I'd say we have SMB pretty well covered. Note that anything that supports KDE or GNOME VFS systems will be able to save to / load from a smb://-style location in those desktops; you obviously cherry picked OO.o as an example because it doesn't support either. KOffice would happily save to smb://somewhere.

What's the problem with Acrobat 7? We have a package of it in our commercial packages section and it works fine (so long as you don't use Chinese / Japanese input, which is a known bug with a workaround), and AFAIK installing from the RPM Adobe distributes works OK too.

Like I say I am mainly focus on user issues. Off course it isn't too hard to type in http://localhost:631, what I meant was it confuses regular user. FYI, /usr/lib/cups/scripts/cupsWebAdmin is the file I was refering to. It helps for regular user to have point and click rather than type. In Mandrake 10.1 and before there was a nice little entry in the configuration section called www cups admin tools. it is missing from LE 2005. If it has been replace with something better, please point me to the right direction.

I agree with you that it wasn't a lot of work to get rid of the penguin, all I am saying is, it make bad first impression on some people (personally, I don't care one way or the other).

I'll admit I have not explore using the MCC mount point, does that require password to be stored? As far as openoffice goes, well, I did not cherry pick this, we decided on openoffice.org back in 8.1, and it is the only one we are aware of that works on all 3 os we deploy in the company. (it had worse bugs then, such as not adhere to umask and gid settings). One thing about smb4k though, it crashes too often, and one thing I always hate is it store password, (I know user has a choice, but moving users from windows to Mandrake often produce the complaint that they have to enter password too often to access a share). Problem with the current state of ALL linux distro is, unless you are using autofs + nfs, there are no easy way to point and click to a share, open a file in oo.o and save it back to the same share without too much hassle and effort. To some this maybe pretty simple stuff, but for people who have to access network share all day long, opening and saving files, this slows them down.

With acrobat 7, we always get a segmentation fault during run time (as of 10.1 never tried to LE) and we do have chinese language support install on all system because we are a in a country which chinese language is one of the main business language. I am not aware of the bug you mention though. (speaking of which, Mandriva shold work on the simplified chinese fonts display, it often turn out much uglier than other distro and often have missing characters).

Oh, yeah, someone mentioned on Cooker list the menu item had disappeared, I never use it and that's not my responsibility so I didn't follow it too closely, but I guess someone's aware of it. Using the MCC wizard to mount a Samba share mounts it in the traditional way, by adding it to fstab where it will be mounted by mount -t smb, so it can be persistent and it will store the username and password if required. You can always do this operation manually, of course, I'm surprised you didn't do that already . No need for autofs if the share is always available, just have it mounted at boot time by putting it in fstab.

Since you have Chinese input you're running into the known bug with Acrobat; it doesn't happen if you don't have a Chinese / Japanese locale defined (and consequently have SCIM loaded), which is why it wasn't caught sooner. Fortunately there's a fix. Edit the file /usr/lib/Acrobat7/bin/acroread (it's a plain text file) and add these two lines right after the second line (which should just be a # symbol on its own):

GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
export GTK_IM_MODULE

save the file, exit your editor, and you should find Acrobat now works. The problem is that due to a compiler mismatch, Acrobat will not work with our default input method for CJK locales, which is SCIM.